Sublimation
by skywalker05
Summary: Fifty sentences about Darth Sidious' life, allies, enemies, and motivations.


_Author's Note: After a long while, I have finally done one of these 50 1-sentence stories challenges. Thanks, __**Mathematica**__, for pointing me toward the theme sets. Choosing Darth Sidious for my subject allows me to span the trilogies as well as some of the histories, so that I can discuss other characters too._

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_Sublimation_

_Theme set beta_

_I. Walking_

The dark path is long, like a journey when you were a child and highways lasted forever, but it is comforting as well, and you find yourself merging with the sound of the engines, falling asleep in the arms of your inability to do anything else except continue on.

_II. Waltz_

Sword-fights are like dancing, but dancing is like subterfuge: the Dark Lord attends the politicians' parties and shows them a pleasant face.

_III. Wishes_

When he was very young, he sat outside at night and wished that the stars would go out, so that they would not stare at him so, and would not bid his gaze fall so far into the depths of distance that he felt he might never be able to get it back.

_IV. Wonder_

He is surprised for a moment, as Luke walks up the throne room stairs and Sidious truly investigates the boy's Force sense, finding it to be clearer and yet more blinding then any he felt from the arrogance-blurred, complacent Jedi Order, and for a moment he is afraid that he has all along been, as they say, a large fish in a small pond.

_V. Worry_

"Do not worry about the losses at Geonosis, Dooku; everything required for victory" (_including your death) "_has been preplanned."

_VI. Whimsy_

Revan must have had a macabre sense of humor, because at the entrance to his tomb there is a warn rock frieze of a man and a woman, happy looking into one another's eyes, and there are many fissures in its surface.

_VII. Wasteland_

He looks out over the ranks of clones, the white snow-field of deadly men, and he is proud of them for what they have not yet done, for what the soft senators beside him do not know that they are going to do.

_VIII. Whiskey and Rum_

The Iridonian wine stains their teeth, but he gives it to his apprentice (not the first one, of course not the last one, but the Zabrak will do, he'll survive long enough) because it is guaranteed to be clean, unlike the water in the Works.

_IX. War_

He bids Luke look at the firefly-melee of X-Wings and TIE fighters and capital ships (he could name them, but they don't matter, not in comparison to this battle fought with scraps of metal), and while they are beautiful, in a distant way, they are also useless to the true battle going on inside, like all beauty is useless.

_X. Weddings_

Vader was in love once, Sidious sees, and so discounts entirely the redeeming power of that emotion.

_XI. Birthday_

He does not remember how old he is.

_XII. Blessing_

He deliberates over which name, Palpatine or Sidious, to think of himself as—whereas he feels little but residual pride about his murder of the giver of one name, Plageus, he feels less still for his parents, for they were apathetic.

_XIII. Bias_

He has no direct hand in Republic propaganda, but he is proud of those who are; beside all the pictures of Jedi and clones in bloodless battles or common citizens walking the streets of insert-name-of-your-planet-here are clever phrases about justice and glory and good, words which can sway anyone, no matter their morality.

_XIV. Burning_

He senses Darth Vader, ensconced in the cocoon which is the only place he can breathe, visit in his mind every star there ever was.

_XV. Breathing_

(But Sidious can only feel Vader's surface thoughts, and there are hints that they are only a façade, but he does not bother to plumb further, because surely the hidden thoughts are only the guilt-hollowed love that Vader feels for Padme.)

_XVI. Breaking_

He thought that he had reached a pinnacle of artistry with the Zabrak's tattoos, but no—Vader is a finer specimen, even more indistinguishable from his mistakes.

_XVII. Belief_

He chooses to call himself _Sidious_ in his thoughts, so that when he is called _Palpatine _by the masses he can grin at their ignorance and hold his secret tight to his just-as-secret heart.

_XVIII. Balloon_

As he looked out at the suspended spheres of water, festive trappings for the Mon Calamarian opera, Sidious realized how deliciously ironic it was that if only Anakin stopped and looked at the dancers he might see how the galaxy was, to Sidious' mind's eye, as choreographed as they were.

_XIX. Balcony_

Darth Maul quietly savours the word 'revenge', and Darth Sidious savors how the apprentice will never receive it.

_XX. Bane_

Yoda, he supposes, is his ultimate enemy, but Sidious has to admire the little alien's ability to hide his true self behind a wrinkled grin, a mask of mirth.

_XXI. Quiet_

Darth Bane was a brutish young cur, but his Rule of Two has served Sidious well, has kept him hidden from the Jedi masses.

_XXII. Quirks_

_Sublimation, _he learned when he was young, meant _a process by which the negative emotions are used in socially positive ways, such as the creation of art, _and he has justified himself with it ever since.

_XXIII. Question_

There is a line from one of the great works of Twi'lek literature: "Can the one who was born underground ever truly be able to appreciate the sky?"

_XXIV. Quarrel_

Never, in the Senate, does he fantasize about _changing _in front of a political enemy's eyes, of showing them Sidious just enough to kill them by lightning—he keeps his worlds neat and separate, until the time is right.

_XXV. Quitting_

And by the time he has quit the disguise, he has gained their trust enough that they will look at his wrinkled-by-arcane-magics face and trust him still.

_XXVI. Jump_

Windu might have been a useful apprentice, almost-accepting of the dark side as he was, but Mace did not see the value of following orders as Anakin did; even as Sidious' insisted he shrivel and die, Mace tried to jump, whereas Anakin would even die on Sidious' terms, so that he could be reborn.

_XXVII. Jester_

It's very funny, how the Jedi carry him through the _Invisible Hand_, how they don't think he can even walk for himself.

_XXVIII. Jousting_

He does not _respect_ Darth Plageus—he was always taught that one day, each Sith apprentice must kill their master—but he enjoyed learning how to fight with the lightsaber, and even more so he enjoyed their verbal bouts.

_XXIX. Jewel_

The crystal statuette on his desk is pushed to the floor as he and Yoda jump from the table to the rising Senate pod, and under the vicious hums of the lightsabers he can barely hear it shatter.

_XXX. Just_

He notices that Senator Amidala does not applaud his coronation, and thinks _pity that she was so weak as to take the side of justice.  
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XXXI. _Smirk_

_Yes—I am what you fear; I devalue every moral that ever gained you praise . _

_XXXII. Sorrow_

Sorrow: that which he has felt only rarely, and before he was old enough to learn to change the world.

_XXXIII. Stupidity_

Darth Maul is so focused on revenge that Sidious feels there would be some lovely irony if the apprentice's death could be counted as such, and so the report he receives from the Jedi of Jinn's death and Kenobi's Trial makes him smile before he forces a public, morose expression.

_XXXIV. Serenade_

Senator Amidala has soft Naboo classical music playing when Senator Palpatine enters her sitting room, and for a moment his heart is tugged toward loyalty to his homeworld—but no; it can be sacrificed, if only so that all the galaxy could be his.

_XXXV. Sarcasm_

"Not from a Jedi," _and not from me. _

_XXXVI. Sordid_

Grievous' transformation leaves the medical center smattered with alien blood, dark like caramel, but it will clean up, it will pave the way for the next experiment.

_XXXVII. Soliloquy_

Words are important; one of the Senate's great weaknesses, he thinks, is its clumsy, forced speakers that the people have come to expect.

_XXXVIII. Sojourn_

Months after Order 66, Jedi are still trickling back to the Coruscant Temple, bravely or in secret, and just to celebrate he kills a few of them himself.

_XXXIX. Share_

It is not that he does not tell his apprentices all that he knows, but that along with the true knowledge he tells them carefully crafted lies within lies, such as that he could and would have reason to save Amidala's life.

_XL. Solitary_

The enclave on Ilum, that icy offshoot of the Coruscant nexus, is late to learn of Order 66, but it too learns.

_XLI. Nowhere_

Sith alchemy surrounds him with serpents of corruption and writhing passion, and he is uncertain of whether they are physically present or just within his mind, just within the framework of his raging selfishness.

_XLII. Neutral_

After his election to Senator he goes home to celebrate Life Day with his parents, and their conversation is so banal, so simple and boring, that he vows to tell them that he is too busy every subsequent year.

_XLIII. Nuance_

He knows that Maul is perhaps his simplest apprentice, but Sidious remembered how so much of ancient literature and architecture discusses the permanence of written words, the link between symbols (characters) and identity (character), and so he designs the old-Sith-inspired tattoos that Maul wears so that one almost feels they could be read like a jagged primitive language, if only one had knowledge of the runes and one of the apprentice's rare stillnesses in which to read them.

_XLIV. Near_

We are as humans always so near death, always affected by it even if we do not know how, that immortality as the light side to death's dark (or perhaps the other way around) fascinated him.

_XLV. Natural_

As Luke Skywalker's head rocks backward with the force of the lightning wracking his body and arcing in blue sparks between his teeth, Palpatine feels as if he is the only right thing in the entire metal Death Star, the only one ancient enough to deserve a place in the world, a forest untouched by man.

_XLVI. Horizon_

It is only now, just before he dies, that he realizes that the missing value in the grand equation was Tatooine, that he overlooked it so quickly, that the story has all along been of a boy reaching for the horizon and taking it.

_XLVII. Valiant_

He is not a pilot—he sends Vader to fight for him in areas such as he has never cared about, and knows that his TIE pilots tend to be expendable, and so he contemplates how _very _useful the squadron who destroyed the Death Star would be to his fleet.

_XLVIII. Virtuous_

The Empire will be beneficial for all, establishing order out of a rickety past, keeping the primitive and unpredictable aliens in their places—but he cannot bring himself to say it is for the "good" of the people—he is enjoying his power too much for that.

_XLIX. Victory _

The Senate is shattering (neither he nor Anakin will need it any more), the cameras are darkened( blinded by lightning,) the holonet is oblivious (he rehearsed what he would tell them long ago), and the world is compressed into _Yoda is falling at my feet at last, like a scrap of cloth, like a stuffed toy dressed by a child. _

_L. Defeat_

Vader once asked whether the Force was truly more powerful than something as imposing as the Death Star, and Sidious answered yes—but only now, at the end, as he fallsandfallsandfalls and the Skywalkers are laughing in his mind, does he really believe it.


End file.
